Recent book publications by CHCAP staff

Cultural Capitals: Revaluing The Arts, Remaking Urban Spaces

Associate Professor Louise Johnson’s book title ‘Cultural Capitals: Revaluing The Arts, Remaking Urban Spaces’, is a book about the power of the arts to enhance city images, urban economies and communities.

Anchored in academic discussion of the Cultural Industries - what they are, how they have emerged, why they matter and how they should be theorized - the book offers a series of case studies drawn from five countries: Australia, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US to examine how the arts contribute to sustainable urban regeneration.

‘While the mantra of cultural capitals has dominated recent debates about urban vitality, this is the first warts-and-all analysis of the experience of first and second order cultural capitals through longitudinal comparative studies. This is a timely and inspiring contribution to the debate about the potential of the arts to enhance urban images, economies and communities.’
Jennifer Craik, University of Canberra, Australia.

From the Barracks to the Burrup

Associate Professor Andrea Witcomb and Kate Gregory recently unveiled their book ‘From the Barracks to the Burrup’, a richly worked and visually stunning publication to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the National Trust in WA (UNSW Press, 2010).

This beautifully designed book contains never-before-published images and draws from a new oral history archive with testimonies from many of the founders, staff and volunteers of the organisation. Heritage battles for the Barracks Arch, the Palace Hotel, the Swan River and the Swan Brewery are covered, as well as the integral role played by grassroots heritage groups. Relations between the Trust, developers and the State Government and changing practices of interpretation and conservation are also discussed.

What emerges is not only a history of the National Trust in Western Australia but also the people that shaped it. It is also a history of the ways in which heritage has been understood and practised across Australia.

Key Issues in Cultural Heritage book series

The first volumes in the series Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with 'Difficult' Heritage (edited by Prof William Logan and Dr Keir Reeves), Intangible Heritage (edited by Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa), and Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights (edited by William Logan, Mairead Nic Craith, Michele Langfield).

“Places of Pain and Shame is a cross-cultural study of sites that represent painful and/or shameful episodes in a national or local community’s history, and the ways that government agencies, heritage professionals and the communities themselves seek to remember, commemorate and conserve these cases – or, conversely, choose to forget them.”

“Intangible Heritage examines the implications and consequences of the idea of ‘intangible heritage’ to current international academic and policy debates about the meaning and nature of cultural heritage and the management processes developed to protect it. It provides an accessible account of the different ways in which intangible cultural heritage has been defined and managed in both national and international contexts, and aims to facilitate international debate about the meaning, nature and value of not only intangible cultural heritage, but heritage more generally.”